Nah, when you've spent ten thousand hours doing something, you get a feel for it. It's not a sentient being, but it gains a feeling and a significance beyond wh

Nah, when you've spent ten thousand hours doing something, you get a feel for it. It's not a sentient being, but it gains a feeling and a significance beyond what's printed on the window sticker. (I would argue that sentient beings don't have souls either. It's just a shorthand for a poorly-defined set of attributes and behaviors.) A lot of people anthropomorphize machines, as it helps engage our built-in anticipation instincts to track when the machine will be "hungry" or "tired" without expending conscious thought. If the machine starts to sound or feel different, even in ways we can't put into words, that may surface as a sense of "attitude" or "unhappiness", and it may do so long before the difference would be dramatic enough to merit other mention. On-board diagnostics are great at identifying certain malfunctions in the engine and a few other systems, but driveline and suspension are still largely unmonitored except by ear, by feel, and by intuition. And there are still plenty of engine conditions that manifest as a gut feeling long before they set a DTC. Getting something checked out when it feels "off", versus waiting until it fails more obviously, may avert an unscheduled mishap in the middle of a cross-country roadtrip. There are certainly lots of people who haven't spent that much time behind the wheel, or whose coming-of-age wasn't inextricably linked to the jingle of keys as a symbol of freedom and independence, or whose appreciation of rock and roll doesn't equate the growl of an electric guitar with the growl of an engine. Those people are to be forgiven for not seeing cars as having souls, but that lack of imagination on their part should not limit the imaginations, or the useful instincts, of the rest of us. EVs have their own quirks and feelings, but there's not such a complicated web of air and temperature and chemistry and hydraulics and cable-stretch and dozens of individual bearings and mounts and linkages behind their behaviors. And they don't have a century of hot-rodding culture built up around them yet, no flames painted on the side, nor any combustion to inspire same. No exhaust notes to tune; if an EV's noises show up in music, it'll be more like Aphex Twin than Van Halen. Which is all well and good, but all of these things move EVs farther from any of the behaviors that we refer to with the shorthand of "soul".